Cindytalk & Philippe Petit – A Question of Re-Entry

As part of the Lumberton Trading Company‘s limited edition subscription series (others in the set include Glass Out – with vox from the late Jhonn Balance; the ever-crackly Main; Brian Conniffe; Human Greed;and Jean-Hervé Péron plus guests) of 12″ singles, Cindytalk – (AKA Gordon Sharp) teams up with Philippe Petitfor a double-A side mini-album.

Taken together, the two sides of vinyl make for an environmental audio travelogue of lengthy proportions, one which rewards the use of both powerful sub-bass speakers and tweeters which can fully capture the higher tones; without wishing to be overly audiophile about such things – though here the benefits compared to an average home stereo setup are noticeable. A good set of computer gaming speakers or a home cinema set would be just as good – as long as there’s plenty of low-end presence

The veteran electronicist and the ubiquitous collaborator extraordinaire deliver an opening foray into hauntingly post-classical chill with “Nanook mit Uentshukumishiteu,” where a piano meanders lost in the frigid wastes of electronic icicles and frozen timecodes. The underlying bass rumble is suitably glacial, ominously omnipresent like the surround-sound passage of haunted ice convoys trundling over occulted routes stretching out before them. There’s hints of the similarly-bleak arctic sounds as generated by Thomas Köner, for example, in the undertow, but the main focus is the circling dance of Sharp’s plangent keys and Petit’s frosty interjections, glancing and reflecting off each other in crisp, almost hyper-Modernist strokes.

“A Wolf In Wolf’s Clothing” continues the frigid theme, roaming abstractly like a shaman transformed through the aid of fly agaric into the titular lupus lupus on a dogged psychogeographical quest across the notional tundra mapped out on side A. Hallucinatory shards of fractured sounds tumble and roil, accumulating mass into a gathering snowball of noise which rolls on implacably, gathering in volume and eventually seeming to demolish the audio spectrum under a welter of crushing dynamics.

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"When they’re all playing harmonising black metal riffs, it creates a sound as full and dense as the forests of Washington State that inspire their eco-friendly riff collage" @wittrofficial @aluk_todolo live at Heaven https://t.co/FbWfunzE6w

"The English Heretic project has been consistently putting out strange and beautiful collections for a while now and this release comes with an OZ-style booklet, lurid and bloody and filled with ephemera..." https://t.co/EHK6vpWzZc